


Heterodyne

by mirawonderfulstar



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Altered Mental States, Angst, Autism Spectrum, Character Study, M/M, Newton Geiszler Has ADHD, POV Newton Geiszler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-14 23:09:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21233900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirawonderfulstar/pseuds/mirawonderfulstar
Summary: Hermann drowns it all out, makes it all quiet.





	Heterodyne

**Author's Note:**

> Heterodyne: adj. Of two oscillations: having two slightly different higher frequencies such that, when combined, they produce a lower frequency.

Seeing Hermann again hurts. He's so close, so _close_ and thrumming away just out of Newt's reach. Alice fills his mind and he tries to scream, tries to fight, thinks that if only he could just get to Hermann that together they could make everything alright again. But he can't manage it, and Alice is there, the roar of another world moving through him, directing him.

It is so loud in Newt's head, these last few years of his life.

Which, really, isn't much different from the first thirty-five years of his life. 

Newt's world is characterized by sound. Piano and opera, something to fill the gaps where his parents had been. His uncle's more modern taste in music, and Newt's own favorites growing out of that. Rock, punk, metal. He doesn't have a strong preference for genre, actually, contrary to the image he tries to put off (unaffected, cool, _rockstar_) so long as it's loud. So long as it fills him up, a swell of sound that pulls the world into focus and lets him _think_. He gets through high school and then college and then grad school on a cacophony of music, sex, and sugar. A girlfriend tells him once, shortly before breaking up with him, that maybe he needs to see someone about whatever he's clearly self-medicating for. 

He does, partly out of some backwards desire to spite her and partly because he'd been trying and failing to write a paper all summer and at this point he'll take anything he can get. The shrink asks him a lot of questions about his childhood and eventually decides he's autistic, which Newt's known since he was ten, and has ADHD, which he hadn't known at all. She writes him a scrip for some medication that's supposed to help him focus, and it does, but three days later the San Francisco attack happens and the world tilts sideways. Drugs for ADHD are not exactly high priority when the world is suddenly burning. 

And then he meets Hermann. 

Well, he doesn't _meet_ Hermann, won't _meet_ Hermann for a good four years. But the two of them, bumping into each other on a forum where the nerds and other socially inept of the world are scrambling to make sense of what's just happened, take an instant shine to each other and exchange email addresses. 

And it's... despite the world burning, despite everything, somehow, this one thing is... perfect. Hermann drowns it all out, makes it all quiet. Hermann is the stillness Newt never knew he needed. Hermann is the calm within the storm of him. 

It's not that Hermann himself is quiet, not even close. Hermann is his own whirlwind, his own messy multimedia montage. Hermann is fussy and particular and he refuses to come to America to see Newt no matter how many times and in how many ways Newt asks, and then they meet at last and Newt makes the colossal mistake of commenting on Hermann's cane. He can't help it. Something just slots into place, somewhere between Hermann's wistfulness for space travel and Newt's own grand visions for himself that often exceed his ability to reach for them. They're two different but similar frequencies, humming along in tandem and somehow cancelling each other out in a way that stabilizes them both, makes them sturdier than they might otherwise have been. 

This is what Newt means, but what he says, in the moment he sees Hermann limping towards him with an oversized coat, far too thick for the warm spring day, and a hesitant smile, is, "nice to see you're just as much of a wreck as I expected." 

It's only years later, in the drift, that he understands the way this, and every subsequent interaction they've ever had in which Hermann chides him for his lack of professionalism, had made Hermann feel. Twin frequencies, a heterodyne set, Newt's mind humming away at a tolerable volume alongside Hermann, _because_ of Hermann, and he'd always assumed the feeling had been mutual. He'd always assumed Hermann enjoyed their bickering, the teasing during their first meeting and then during the years they'd shared the k-science lab at the Hong-Kong Shatterdome. He'd assumed because he had never been good enough with people to do anything else, to think of how others' minds worked. That was for philosophers and poets and not, Newt had always thought, for kaiju-groupie biologists. 

But now. Now he spends every day wishing he had tried harder, had taken advantage of those years to get close to Hermann, given him the respect and the theory-of-mind he deserved. Because Hermann can save him, Hermann can pull him back out of the babble that is Alice, and he will never, ever, come looking for him now that Newt has so thoroughly pushed him away. Alice's hold is too strong now, and Newt is just something small and brittle and bright in the core of it, visible light on the much wider electromagnetic spectrum. 

He could have said something, extended some kind of apology after the drift, and he hadn't, and in retrospect he wants to scream because he doesn't know _why_. Any small fear or pride he might have had pales in comparison to the situation he is in now, trapped in his own body and forced to watch as he isolates himself even further, locks himself in with the beast that is his captor. He hadn't known quite what he was doing when he disappeared from the press circuit and tracked down Alice all those years ago, in the wake of the cancelled apocalypse. But he had known, he _had_, that night in their now useless and soon-to-be-decommissioned lab, when Hermann had looked at him with what he had realized, suddenly, was hope, was _longing_. He had known he should say something, and he'd failed. And when Hermann had called him some months later to interrogate him about leaving the PPDC to go into the private sector, he'd had just enough control to stop Alice from twisting that hope back at Hermann. 

And now he is tied to a chair in a military base somewhere, and he is relieved, because surely now, _now_ Hermann will come find him. Hermann will cancel out the noise in his head, like he's always done, will make the world quiet. Alice can rage all she likes, now, even as she laughs at Jake Pentecost, and Newt laughs at her in the same breath, because her time is up. Hermann will find him. He has to. 


End file.
